(To be continued.)
[LESSONS FROM NATURE.]
By JEAN A. OWEN, Author of "Forest, Field and Fell," etc.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
Christ, the divine teacher, has taught us to go to nature for moral and spiritual lessons. "Consider the lilies of the field," He says to those who are anxious about, and careworn with the things of this life: and that old triangle of a problem with its hard points: "What shall we eat? what shall we drink? and wherewithal shall we be clothed?" does press heavily on many even of those who read our Girl's Own Paper. The fall of the sparrow, too, He tells us, is noted by His Father and ours. He bids those who are neglectful of the talents given to them, learn a lesson of the barren fig-tree. Again the rapid and marvellous development of the mustard-tree, in the mouth of the great teacher, becomes an image of the faith that He bids us have. And even when speaking of the yearning love He had for souls, He did not disdain to use the simile: "As a hen gathereth her young." And so, if the eyes are quick to note all that surrounds us, all the wonderful life, "the infinitely small" as well as "the infinitely great," and the heart makes room for love, it will be possible to learn, from the first year of our lives, until the day of our death here, lessons from nature which no man or woman has ever yet exhausted, nor ever will.
One of my earliest memories is of an old-world garden where our mother, who was an ardent lover of the beautiful, would direct the attention of my sisters and myself to the pencilling on the petal of this and that flower. God's finger painted the velvety face of the pansy, she told us. And how often I pondered over this expression and wondered if that finger did its work in the garden when we were asleep.
Our dear mother gave us a love for nature which has been our resource and consolation in many a sorrow, and which has filled the void of what would otherwise have been weary, monotonous hours.